I nod and start folding the map.
"Rex."
I stop.
Knox pushes his chair back and studies me. Body language, scent, the angle of my shoulders and what it costs me to hold them level.
"The brothers have noticed that you've been sleeping in the garage. Is there something wrong with your apartment?" Not a question. He can smell it on me: motor oil and cold concrete and the absence of anything warm.
"Apartment's fine. I've been working late."
Knox doesn't push. He nods once and turns back to the map, and I'm grateful for the out because the truth is uglier than sleeping on a shop floor. The truth is that my apartment smells like Holly—her shampoo ground into the pillow she used to sleep on, the cherry bourbon she spilled on the kitchen counter three weeks ago that I never wiped up because cleaning it felt like erasing her. The truth is that the hair tie she left on my bathroom sink sits where she put it, a black elastic loop curled on the porcelain lip, and I've looked at it every morning since she left it there and I haven't touched it once.
Evening. I've been avoiding the Anchor for two days.
Two days since Holly stood behind the bar and cut me open with a sentence I can't shake loose.You don't get to be jealous of a man who asked me out to dinner. Not when you can't even stay till morning.I've replayed it on every mile of fire road, every hour of scout surveillance, every cold night on the shop floor with my jacket balled under my head.
She's right. That's the part I can't get around, and I've got no counter, and the word that's been hammering at the base of my skull for six months doesn't care whether I'm ready.
I go to the Anchor because the apartment is a museum of things I can't bring myself to touch, the scout work is done for the day, and the silence in my own head is louder than any bar on a Sunday night.
My stool. My bourbon. The dent in the brass rail where my hand bent it the night Finn ran his mouth about Holly's legs.
Holly isn't there.
Sal stands behind the taps. The old troll fills my glass without asking, sets it down, and goes back to polishing a tumbler with a cloth that's seen more nights than most buildings in this town. The regulars murmur in the back booth. The jukebox is off.
I look at Holly's station. The speed rail she keeps organized by height. The photos she's tacked to the back mirror: the harbour at dawn, a fishing boat listing at its mooring, Griz framed in the doorway with the neon bleeding across his stone face. Her jacket isn't on the hook. Her bag isn't under the bar.
"Where is she?"
Sal doesn't look up. "Out."
I wait. Sal lets me wait. Four hundred years of pouring drinks means she knows a silence will do more damage than anything she could say.
"The writer. Tyler." Sal sets the glass down and picks up another one. "Took her to that steak place on the harbour." She doesn't look at me. "Second date."
My hand closes around the tumbler. The bourbon shakes in the glass. Sal glances at my hands, then goes back to wiping. Fourhundred years behind a bar means she's seen worse than a tight grip.
The glass survives. So does the bourbon. I sit there nursing it with nowhere to go, because leaving means admitting I'm waiting for a woman who isn't waiting for me.
Sal wipes the bar in front of me, slow and deliberate. She refills my glass without being asked.
"You know," she says, "I poured his drinks all night when he started coming in here. He tips twenty percent and asks me how my evening's going."
I set my glass down. "I tip thirty."
"You tip thirty and leave the woman I raised behind this bar crying in her apartment at three in the morning." Sal's voice doesn't change. "Doesn't take much to see which one of you is worth more of her time, Rex. Even for trolls."
I don't answer. Sal moves down the bar and doesn't say another word.
An hour passes. I nurse the second bourbon and stare at the photos tacked to Holly's mirror. The harbour shot is new, a long-exposure print, the dock lights streaked into gold ribbons across the black water. She shot it from the pier, alone, two or three in the morning when the fishing boats come in. The composition is sharp and deliberate.
I never asked to see her photographs. Six months with my hands on her body and I never asked.
The front door opens.
Cold air and the smell of rain, and then Holly walks in. Jacket zipped to her chin. Cheeks flushed from the wind. She's laughingat something on her phone, a bright, loose sound, thumb scrolling as she pushes through with her shoulder.
